I'm married to a wonderful woman who, despite her attempts to be understanding about my crossdressing, wishes the whole thing would just go away.

There are a lot of reasons for her not being accepting, but here's one I'd like to hear your opinions about.

My wife thinks that my crossdressing is insulting to women. There's so much more to being a woman than the clothes and makeup, but by thinking that clothes and makeup make us more feminine, we reduce women to creatures to whom fashion and appearance are everything and are the essence of being a woman. Our attempts at looking like women is a parody of what real women look like and a gross exaggeration of what women think is important.

My knee jerk reaction is probably what a lot of yours is: one of the reasons we like to dress is because we love women and love how they look. If anything, there's an aspect of jealousy in some of our dressing. There's also an aspect of jealousy when we see a beautiful woman and think "she's beautiful" and "I would love to be able to wear that outfit and look beautiful, too."

I'm trying to get past instant reactions. I can understand part of what my wife is saying. Most women I know don't spend a lot of time obsessing over their appearance. They're too busy doing really important things like working, taking care of children, trying to keep in touch with friends and family, trying to figure out how to make the world better and probably spending too much time on taking care of other people and not enough time taking care of themselves.

Many of us crossdressers invert this by having a somewhat selfish attitude to crossdressing. We don't get dolled up so we can make a dish for the person down the street who's not feeling well or visiting an older relative in a nursing home. We mostly do it for the thrill (sexual or, for many older cds, a different kind of relaxed / energized feeling).

Still, I get that being a woman is not about finding that perfect pair of pumps and sending notes to girlfriends telling them how their new outfit is sooooo cute. But, there are aspects of being a cd that are. I don't think that just because we emphasize what we think are the fun things about femininity that that makes what we do insulting to women.

What do you think?

I'm also really interested in what real women think about this whole argument. As my wife has pointed out, the attitudes of other crossdressers may be just a bit biased.